Alert and Oriented

My cousin runs an Ambulance Company. He said that when they respond to a trauma victim the first thing they ascertain is the level of coherence in the victim. The best is alert and oriented times four. The person knows:

Who s/he is

Where s/he is

What time of day it is

What happened

As a marriage counsellor, I often encounter those who are alert and oriented times zero.

They’ve forgotten who they are in Christ.

They have no idea how close they are losing everything they hold dear.

They don’t know how late in the game it is and

They have no idea how they got to that point, nor do they know that God allowed it for a reason.

I’ve said before that the suffering and loss and pain that we experience in life and in marriages or other relationships bring to the surface the worst of who we are. Now atheists, fools that they are, think that a loving God would give us a world where absolutely no suffering of any kind exists. They either don't know or don't care (probably the latter) that in that kind of a world, in combination with the human trait of corrupt self-love, we would all stay emotional and psychological psychopaths. We would remain completely and totally self-absorbed, self-obsessed. Much like what we see in the atheist movement. In a perfect world, in a paradise absent the presence of evil, there would not be the existence of nor the need for suffering, pain, loss, grief and fear. 

As everyone knows, thanks to human nature, we're a long, long way from paradise.

So, in times of stress and difficulty God allows the most repugnant of our characteristics to float to our awareness. Allowing or causing suffering and tragedy is God’s way of giving us the opportunity to let Him change who we are. When we see the reflection of who we are, that is brought to our awareness by difficulties we have a choice of action to take.

. Alarmed by what they see, those in an intimate relationship with Jesus cry out, “Go deeper Lord. Dig it all out. Change me. Heal me. Make me who You want me to be.”

. Another avenue that some people take is to embrace the evil; they become the evil. They have the affair, hit the child, call their spouse degrading names, leave the marriage, abandon the children.

. And finally we have atheists; those who use suffering, usually the suffering of someone else as an excuse to reject God. They do this without know that that is the exact reason God allowed this suffering in their lives; to drive them farther down the road they have chosen to be forever separated from their Creator.

Only the first of these three option indicates a person who is alert and oriented time four. These are the only one who will survive to experience paradise.